Whacked by the Good Guys

Vincent "The Schemer" Drucci had the shortest tenure of any of Chicago’s North Side gang leaders. An Italian, he headed a gang that was dominated by Irish, German and Polish criminals. A mob rarity, he was given a 21-gun salute at his funeral. But most notably, he may have been the only mob boss ever to be killed by a law enforcement officer.

Vincent "The Schemer" Drucci had the shortest tenure of any of Chicago’s North Side gang leaders. An Italian, he headed a gang that was dominated by Irish, German and Polish criminals. A mob rarity, he was given a 21-gun salute at his funeral. But most notably, he may have been the only mob boss ever to be killed by a law enforcement officer.

The leaders of the North Side Gang during the 1920s were Dion O’Bannion, Earl "Hymie" Weiss, Drucci, and George "Bugs" Moran. Of the four, Drucci was said to be the least known and least influential. The "Schemer" got his nickname from his ability to come up with hare-brained, "hits, heists and kidnappings." Early in his criminal career he gained a reputation for breaking into public pay phones. Laurence Bergreen, in his book, Capone: The Man and the Era, describes Drucci: "He had a streak of recklessness and daring, and he looked the part of a gangster – tough, dark, and menacing, his expression frozen in a tragic mask topped by wild unkempt hair (and) a face to haunt the dreams of his enemies."

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With the purpose of writing about true crime in an authoritative, fact-based manner, veteran journalists J. J. Maloney and J. Patrick O’Connor launched Crime Magazine in November of 1998.

Their goal was to cover all aspects of true crime: from organized crime to serial killers, from capital punishment to prisons, from historical crimes to celebrity crime, from assassinations to government corruption, from justice issues to innocent cases, from crime films to books about crime. Read More